Timber Timbre

ca

Timber Timbre's music has always traced a shadowed path, using cues of the past to fuse the sound of a distant, haunted now. On its fourth record – Sincerely, Future Pollution – Timber Timbre coats the stark, sensual sound of 2014's Hot Dreams in an oil-black rainbow of municipal grime. It is the cinema of a dizzying dystopia, rattled by the science fiction of this bluntly nonfictional time.

"2016 was a very difficult time to observe," Kirk says. "I hate to admit that normally I express more sensitivity than concern politically, but I think the tone and result on the record is utter chaos and confusion. When we were recording, the premonition was that the events we saw unfolding were an elaborate hoax. But the mockery made of our power system spawned a lot of dark, dystopic thoughts and ideas. And then it all happened, while everyone was on Instagram. The sewers overflowed."

Sincerely, Future Pollution stands out in Timber Timbre's catalogue of imagistic records, with Kirk and band-mates Mathieu Charbonneau and Simon Trottier taking a unique approach to Timber Timbre's process of sonic invention. Kirk wrote the songs in late 2015/early 2016, then arranged the music over a "very focused" Montreal winter with the veteran Timber Timbre members.

For the recording, the trio – armed with "secret weapon" Olivier Fairfield on drums – travelled to La Frette chateau outside Paris, where they looked to the studio's array of archetypal synthesizers for the flesh of the songs. Be it the freedom of recording abroad, or the revelation of these unexplored instruments, Timber Timbre found a release from artistic constriction and created its most daring work yet.

Perhaps for the first time, Timber Timbre indulged its alleged "decade drift" – from the self-titled record's 50s doo-wop, to Creep On Creepin On's oblique 60s folk, and Hot Dreams' 70s caprice – allowing the tools to personify the songs. A blend of the album's mid-apocalyptic setting and its idyllic recording, Sincerely, Future Pollution is a romance of neoteric machines and dark, futuristic hues: with promise as beautiful as it is unsettling.

The result is a newfangled sound with the plastic, cinematic tint of 80s avarice. "Grifting" struts, literally grifts, a deep, synthetic funk, with brash determination never before heard in Timber Timbre's earthy catalogue. Kirk's lyrics, in his unmistakably chilling croon, show a palate for the acridity of crime – Pulling off a fast one / Riffing off the last one / Reeling in the big one / Fished-in fished-in / Grifting Grifting Grifting – before pivoting into the gilded chorus of a haloed, Hollywood bedroom scene.

Wresting sincerity from abstraction, Kirk submits to the cycle of self-obsession at the album's core. Sincerely, Future Pollution is Timber Timbre's document of this generation's degeneration and disarray. With Kirk as narrator, a party to the play, we get caught in the folly of the echo chamber, awed by the contrast of this gothic modern age.